Mrs. Blingham urged, “Come on. We can’t waste all day looking at this dump. The hotel-guide gives the Pineland as the best place for chow. Let’s try it.”

They did not notice them, but on the way to the Pineland they must have passed scrollwork palaces of 1880, an Italian Catholic Church, a pawn-shop in which a Lithuanian lumberjack had recently pawned the Lüger pistol with which he had murdered a Siamese mining-camp cook, the best women’s dress-shop between Fort William and Dallas, a Victoria Cross aviator, and a Negro clergyman who was a Doctor of Philosophy.

In front of the tapestry-brick, nine-storied Hotel Pineland (designed by Lefleur, O’Flaherty, and Zipf of Minneapolis), Mr. Blingham said doubtfully, “Well, I suppose we can get some kind of grub here.”

They thought it very funny that the more choosy of the two restaurants in the Pineland should presumptuously be named “The Fiesole Room,” though they would not have found it funny if they had known that locally it was pronounced “Feesoly,” because that was how the Blinghams pronounced it, also.

The Fiesole Room had, for cinquecento atmosphere, Pompeian-red walls, majolica dishes, a Spanish wine-jar on either side of the doorway, and a frieze of antique Grecian runners done by a local portrait-painter.

“My, my, don’t they put on the dog in—what’s the name of this town again?” mocked Sister.

“Grand Rapids,” said Mr. Blingham.

“No, that’s the furniture, where Aunt Ella comes from. This,” said Mrs. Blingham authoritatively, after looking at the map, “is Grand Republic.”

“What a silly name!” pronounced Sister. “Sounds like Fourthajuly. Oh, God, these hicks!”

They were elaborately escorted to a table by the headwaiter, a dignified, erect colored man whose head resembled a brown billiard ball. They did not know that he was Drexel Greenshaw, the leader of the conservative wing of the Negro Community. He looked like a bishop, like a general, like a senator, any of whom he might have been if he had chosen another calling than table-waiting and another color.

Mr. Blingham had the Hungarian goulash. Mrs. Blingham was bold in the matter of roast lamb. Sister took the chicken salad, snapping at the colored waiter, “And do try to have a little chicken in it, will yuh?”

They found it highly comic that the waiter bowed, and said, “Yes, Miss.” They could not have explained why they found it comic. As they said, “You have to be a New Yorker to understand our Sense of Humor. A nigger hash-hustler in a dump like this making like he was at the Ritz!”

It is true that in New York, on their evenings of festival, they did not dine at the Ritz but at a Schrafft’s.

Toying delicately with her chicken salad, but finishing all of it as well as all the rolls, Sister looked cynically about the Fiesole Room.

“Mm, mm! Respected parents, will you look at the table to my right? Please buy him for me—the young one.”

The person whom she had thus favored was an amiable man of thirty with solid shoulders and freckled paws and the clear skin that often goes with red hair like his. You thought of football, later tempered by tennis. But what you most noticed was the singular innocence of his blue eyes and the innocence and enthusiasm of his smile.